Very important : Please look at the coments on the end with many updates

You may not know thatI am a avid book reader. Since I was young I was advanced by two yeas in the high schoolreading books on maths and chemistry of the university . by the time, as student of marketing and economics and the time I was learning English language I wasreadingAmerican books of marketing advertising and public relations and nearly little later with books on sellingwhich was my favoritereading . Since then upon the times I was adding in reading to some other specialized book areas such as related to radio and electronics , food and nutrition (a subjectthat I am still interested) computer techniques and programs with some interest in photopaint etc , and till nowwith some interest in baby caring , by reading magazines and books

With the advent of book searching via the net I have collected some vey interesting booksthat some of them have already been printed …..

… until IO have boughtvery recentlya e-book reader that is supposed to stop printing !

Thise reader have been boughtfrom Plaisio , a chain storeof computer systemsand peripherals sold under the name turbo xE B600 , which is the brand name of mostly OEM products from supposedly China . This e reader usesthee ink technologya property patent from E ink companyusing micro bubbles to orientate in a thin film screen

Its formatis very minimalusing 4+1 navigation buttons. At the right of this picutre there ar the buttons for font sizing

And hereis a picture with the buttons on the left pane : First button goes for multimendia (smething i am not interested ), lanscape mode , exit mode(frm eradding mode ) and property mode (all adjustments including status bar etc )

The company claimsthata power chargecan support ca 7000 pagesor 30 hours of button operation …

Its inside memory of ca 375MBcontainsthe ebook guide in the main directoryand n separate directoryca 60 books in pdf format , which are under the public domain . Several of them are Shakespeare’s Romeo nd Juliet , Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The art of war and many othersand only two Greek e-books .

Navigationis quite simple

- the reader is normally set to being switched always on . This is in contrast to most electronic appliances m becauseonce a page is applied , no electricityrequiredto keep the bubbles in their position ! In its off condition there is still a picture on the screen

- A memory slot is also available using SD cards with memories up to 4 GB, The company Plaisio suggeststo insert the SD card with the power off …

-Directory listing is of 3 modes , the basic can show only the titles , the second showsthe page name and a thumbnail of thefile and the third does it on two columns

This is the analytical mode

THis is the landscape file mode

-Directory listing also supports direct access to the flash memory and files are shown mixed with a descriptive mark on the screen. ON the above picture is this shown on the exterme right of the dir listing There is ability to sortfiles by title , by author

-Opening a fileis quite simple by just pressing the [enter ]in a file . In just 1-3 seconds most files have been loaded, depending on the file size . chm fileshowever require much more time , a 3.5 MB file requires about 40 secs!

Once a file is opened , there is the abilityto change the font size with the buttons located in the right part of the reader . The correct page layout can be seen using the font off or size ‘1’ .

The 2nd button from the leftcan turn the view into landscape . This happens also in the dir listing.

Navigation is made with the 4 buttons . Left and right up and down work correctly for the directory listings but in reading mode left/up and right/down arrows do samework . Could expect a better solution

Now , testing the reader I have found several interesting and peculiar things a follows:

First e ink is not 100% white . See this picture :

It seems eink is 60% gray leveled comapring to the pure white

-Resizing fonts (numbers 2-7 )in pdfs with layouts , destroys the format in full separating the pictures at the ‘end’ of the virtual page . Landscaping retains the format in the font off option (1) butsplits the page into two parts upper and lower. Pageswith very small upper and lower marginssuffer from truncation ….(and that’s still debating in several cases )

For example this page

wit font resizing pctures beasme this way . I think that Adibe erader which is built in did this fault

In most casesthe fonts this way are still quite small , atleast 4-5 pixels . Possibly better results could be madeif the screencould be 9 or more inches But since thesebig models require more than …..€600 you can saythis is sufficient . Sometimesa…. magnifying glasscan help a lot!!!

-Pdfs with scanned pictures result in just pageresize . Lanscape orientation can show normally the upper and the lower half into page parts

-Landscape pdfs are correctlyshown in the landscape mode

-IN a very condensed , small font , 3 columnfile , resizingit causes more small-ling of the characters size !!

- Table layout once font isincreasedfrom off, is destroyed and text is shown as it was a copy paste from a html file into wordpad

- Most photos can be shown correctly !

- Since the purchase I have used forca 6 hours with continous play . The battery was on the half charge as shown in the screen but in this timethe battery was drained off though on screen it shown a ¼ charge ratio.I then charged for cxa 1,5 hr timeand shown a full batterybut with just 3 minutes of button play the battery level wasback to the middle!!!

And on the end this is the question : to e read or not to e-read ? As for the moment I am with mixed impressions . Have seen some more moels on another chain store with somehow very smallprice differences and on other models (Cool reader , be book )

6 comments:

have to add about the abilityof ereaders :as in above i am an avid book reader as well magazines reader . AS i have not only standard books , about 2000 in total , due to my interests have printed sevreal books i fond from the net but due to the relatively high cost of the printing , i decided to buy this.I agree that hard copy is good idea , and for many times i do notices inside any hard book as for example writing translation of unknown english words and also writng my commentsthis is something that the e-erader can't do , but only the acrobat erader in your computer can do , with the best and lightest among them is foxit which i prefer than adobe's with very few cases adobe's to go further . Sorry Adobe !

and one more reason: As i nearly everyday print news materials frm the RSS sources , till now i did a printing of ca 25 pages 12 picas Arial into 9 pages of times roman with 9 picas formatted into 2 columns with 0,86 line spacing And for less personal ink i used my printer to a 2/5 dark and economy mode (it is a HP laser printer) comparing to 3/5 standard modei hope that this way , the ereader can save me, in the future

1- though supposedly the reader does not require electricity after a page is shown , there is still electricity coming thru its monitor . Using my radio Tecsun 550 close to the reader's monitor there was some monitor noise activity in the range of 2-2.5 cm . Turning the reader off tere was NO monitor generated noise though monitor shown a a off operation . While operating reader can generate noises to 20 cm distance !!

2- as in result the reader can drain the battery in a period of ca 2 weeks while not in use or about 400-500 pages for a 3/4 charged battery. I wonder if this battery is expired

3- font sizing : goes depending on the page conditions and if a page has pictures that go beyond margins . Even personally generated PDfs using either Adobe or Foxit printers , can result to a shrunk pages

4- bookmarks : bookmaking is quite simple. In most cases bookmarked pages have a distinct symbol on the left upper edge of the page.But after a given number of bookmarks the symbol is not shown , though list can show them all.In one book however no bookmark could be kept but neither page resume worked

5- search option: numbers are missing . I wonder if was it a problem from Adobe

6- and something undocumented: if a pdf file includes tags and links , two of the arrows find the links to be executed by the enter button

and more on the reaader!!Printing from web browsers most times cuts fonts in the middle , making them unreadable most times. It happened to me to use same feature and have the fonts cut this way . But the e-reader using the font re size mode corrects this problem showing the fonts in full , though the page layout is destroyed

I printed once via the yahoo mail using the text selection and on 14 pcs . The +1 size kept the fonts of same height and formatted in full page , and the +2 resized to higher picas